Abstract:
The National Soil Resources Institute incorporates the former Soil Survey and Land Research Centre and as a result maintains all the published and unpublished paper soil reports and maps for England and Wales and a large body of digital soil information.

The digital information comprises the following principle data sets.

-Vector and gridded vector versions of the 1:250,000 scale National Soil ... Map (NATMAP) including the simplified Soilscapes version,

-The National Soil Inventory of data on soils and topsoil chemistry,

-Representative values or a range of properties and derived functional values for soil series,

-Soil profile descriptions, a proportion of which have accompanying analytical data.

All these data sets are held in the LandIS relational database that is maintained by NSRI staff.

Access Constraints
Arrangements for access to soil data are governed by an agreement between NSRI and Defra acting on behalf of the Crown. Under the LandIS Agreement:

-Data are only ever licensed (i.e. not sold) for use over a specified period,

-Departments of the Crown and their contractors are entitled to royalty-free data for specified ... applications, and therefore only pay an administrative fee to cover the cost of extraction and administration,

-Bona fide researchers are entitled to data on a similar basis,

-NSRI is entitled to charge all other individuals and groups, including the Executive Agencies, an additional royalty fee to reflect the value of the information. Royalty fees are calculated using a set of standardised charging formulae that apply progressive discounts on base rates for larger volumes of data.